The Ghost in Love (22 page)

He held nothing back. “Because your powers are gone, or most of them. You're almost a normal person now. I knew it the moment I saw you appear in the bathroom before. If you do have any leftover powers or whatever, they'll be gone soon. You can't depend on them anymore.”

Ling didn't react to this news. She only wanted to know the truth so she could adjust to it. “How do you know these things?”

He put his hand on the top of his head. “
I
don't know anything; some part of me does. A part I don't know or control. It brought me back here from the woods in Crane's View.
I
didn't do that. I didn't have anything to do with it. I'm positive it's the same part that stopped me from dying when I hit my head last winter.

“I don't know what it is or where it is in me. And I have no idea what it's going to do next. But it's taken over; it's the boss now. It's me, it's
mine
, but I'll be damned if I know what it is.

“That's how I knew before that Danielle was doing something now that could be bad for her: it just came over me, like a cloud in front of the sun. I did nothing.”

Ling answered in a steady, confident voice, because she was sure what she would say was correct. “Your will is going in front of your consciousness.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your will has taken over. It decided it's time to take action. And now it has.”

He considered this. “Can't you tell me something ghosts know that might help now?”

Ling grinned. “Not anymore, pal. You just said I'm no different from you now. But I'm sure what I'm saying is true. I'm sure I'm right.

“You can talk to ghosts and dogs now, Ben. You understand our languages. But there's so much more.” She held up a hand and counted off each achievement on her fingers. “You stopped your own death. You traveled through time to get back here. I took you to the park in Crane's View and Gina Kyte's basement, but you brought yourself back to the present.

“What more proof do you need? Something inside you that was
dormant till now woke up, stepped forward, and said, ‘Enough is enough. Let's go.' I believe it's your will: the part of Ben Gould that sees a problem, determines what needs to be done, and takes action.”

“And even stops death?” he asked.

“Yes, and even stops death.”

Danielle Voyles picked up
the lip balm and turned it around and around in a hand held up close to her face. She examined the object as if it were a precious artifact from an ancient civilization. The product was called Carmex and came in a small white-and-yellow plastic jar. It was empty and had been for many years. Nevertheless, she always kept it in a prominent place on her vanity table. Once after moving to a new apartment she thought she had lost it, which made her extremely upset. She had been thinking about this small container ever since German Landis explained the significance of her red “Rudi” stone earlier in the day.

When Danielle got home after the madness at Benjamin Gould's apartment, she went straight to her bedroom to make sure the Carmex was right where it belonged, because that little empty jar was
her
important talisman. It was the first thing Danielle Voyles had ever stolen.

She loved stealing things and was a skillful thief. But until she was twelve years old she had never known how gratifying it was. One day, on the spur of the moment, she stole this jar of lip balm from the neighborhood drugstore for no reason other than she wanted it and no one was around to see her snitch it. That impulsive act changed her life in many ways.

Being the child of religious parents, Danielle had suppressed any sensations of exhilaration or adrenaline rushes throughout her body. The best she had experienced was the joy, the intense joy, that she felt every time she took a risk and walked down a street afterward with whatever she had put in her pocket, hot in her hand because she hadn't let go once since lifting it. Hot from the heat of holding it too tightly as she walked, poised but petrified, out of a store, the object now hers forever for free because she'd been wily and careful about stealing it just right.

Over the years she'd stolen so many things that she became a thoroughly adept and blasé thief. She rarely stole anymore, true, but if she needed something and the circumstances were right, she still simply took it and never thought twice about it.

While in the hospital recuperating, Danielle began wondering if her freakish accident had been some kind of cosmic punishment for her lifetime of petty theft. What goes around comes around. In her case it had come around in the form of a plane crash that shot a metal splinter into her skull.

That's why she began reading all those religious texts afterward. What if God finally got around to her case and, having reviewed the facts, had begun His retribution? Could that be what was happening to her now? Looking at the Carmex container in her hand, she speculated once again: What if I hadn't stolen this goop that day? Would any of this be happening to me now? No pen would have punctured my head. And no earless creature would be dragging a dead red monster across a kitchen floor right in front of my eyes.

Turning the empty jar around and around in her hand, she could not stop thinking, What if? And the third time she thought it, the chance to find out arrived as silently as a cat walking into a carpeted room.

When Danielle looked up and focused on her surroundings, she saw that she was standing inside a small drugstore. Not a mammoth place with aisles that stretch forever and carry a hundred different varieties of aspirin and vitamins. At first glance one could easily see this was a mom-and-pop business with just enough of everything to keep the neighborhood happy. Intermittent shelves were half-empty because the owners hadn't gotten around to restocking them yet. Some of the products in there she hadn't seen, much less thought about or used, since her childhood.

Twelve-year-old Danielle Voyles now appeared at the other end of the aisle. She wore a simple navy blue dress that the adult recognized immediately. The girl's hair came to just below her ears. She was a sweet-looking kid, not this and not that. The most memorable thing about her was the beat-up man's leather briefcase she carried. It looked wholly out of place in her small hand. It looked as if she were holding her dad's bag because he was somewhere nearby and would be joining her at any moment.

Walking down the aisle, the girl now looked at adult Danielle but plainly didn't see her. Dawdling here and there, picking things up and putting them down again, she moved slowly toward her older self.

Adult Danielle watched the girl with delight and only a little apprehension. Seeing her actual twelve-year-old self living, breathing, moving, humming now, and not as a faded, frozen image in an old photograph was just too exciting and surreal not to be wonderful. The girl was humming . . . Yes! She was humming the song “Oh Happy Day.”

At that moment, though, something went wrong, and it began with the buttons.

Her mother had made the blue dress for her when she was eleven and had her daughter choose buttons she liked. Watching this girl in blue walk up the aisle toward her now, Danielle looked at them
and remembered the day she'd bought them. But while focusing specifically on the large round white buttons, they began to change from white to yellow and finally to green. They changed shape too. While she watched, they went from round and white to banana yellow half-moons. A few seconds later the half-moon buttons transformed into green frog buttons. All this while the girl walked toward her adult self.

In her late teens, Danielle had owned a sexy dress with banana yellow half-moon buttons on it. In her closet at home now was a housecoat she changed into after work. It had green frog buttons down the front.

Upset, she shifted her gaze from the morphing buttons to the face coming toward her. It was no longer a twelve-year-old's face. The body remained the same but there was a flickering around the edges of that countenance and it became a much younger girl this time: Danielle at five or six.

This child, this six-year-old Danielle Voyles, stopped at a shelf and took down a small yellow-and-white jar of Carmex. After making sure no one was around, she twisted it open and stuck her finger deep into the middle of the ointment. She smeared the pungent stuff back and forth across her small lips. Then, screwing the top back on, she moved to put the jar back on the shelf. Halfway there, her arm slowed and stopped. Again checking to make sure no one was coming, the girl slid the Carmex into the front pocket of her dress.

While watching the theft, the adult suddenly grasped two previously unknown facts about herself that changed her self-image forever.

The first revelation was this: although she was twelve when she stole for the first time, it was actually the six-year-old Danielle who had committed the theft. Not the seventh-grade, just-recently-discovered-boys,
embarrassed-to-have-to-use-her-father's-old-briefcase-in-school girl. No,
that
Danielle was not a thief.

True, her body was twelve when she stood in the drugstore aisle and heard something inside her scream,
Steal it!
But it was the six-year-old, elated by the danger and risk, who pushed aside any doubts and took it.

For the first time in her life, adult Danielle realized it is all of our selves that have lived up until this moment that decide what we do: not only the me who is living right now.

And there is no saying which one of those selves will prevail.

Out of that revelation grew the second: all of our selves—past and present—determine what we do every minute of our lives.

Danielle Voyles did not start stealing when she was twelve. She started stealing when her six-year-old self ordered her twelve-year-old self to do it.

Having realized these things, the woman's hands began to shake. She was twenty-nine. She'd had a so-so life. Some of it had been her doing, some not. But how much of her middling life had happened the way it did because the wrong Danielles had made the wrong decisions? How many times should the last decider have been younger or older, more cynical or more trusting, than the one who'd had the final say?

Of course six-year-old Danielle was still alive in the twelve-year-old. She was alive in the twenty-nine-year-old too. The six-year-old was part of her history, one of the first rings of the Danielle Voyles “tree.” But what the adult had never known until this minute was that child not only continued living inside but had also played a significant role at least once in determining her later destiny.

Feeling a tug on her sleeve, Danielle looked down and saw that the twelve-year-old in blue was now standing beside her. The adult
started to nod but stopped and shook her head no instead. No, she did not understand this. No, it was not all right. Time passed before she grasped the significance of the fact the girl had touched her: she was now visible to her younger self.

“I'll meet you outside,” the girl said, and turned around and walked toward the front of the store. What else was there to do but follow?

Through the windows she saw that it was drizzling outside. But, approaching the front door, she also saw that despite the wet weather, some kind of event was happening in the drugstore's small parking lot. There were only two cars parked out there on opposite sides of the lot, which was good, because set up directly in the middle of it were four picnic tables. All of them were full of people. Women. Every table was full of females of all ages. Danielle thought it must be a meeting of the Girl Scouts and their mothers or a women's club and their daughters.

Because of the wet, gray day and her physical distance from the group, she did not get a clear view of any of the faces at the tables out there until she'd pushed the door open and stepped outside. The drizzle was warm and pleasant, despite the fact it was coming down steadily. The delicious smell of grilled meat hung in the air, together with the smells of wet asphalt and trees.

She scanned the tables for the girl in blue but did not see her. What Danielle did see was her self sitting at the picnic tables. Her self and her self and an assortment of other versions of her self were sitting at the four picnic tables. All of the women sitting together, young and old, were Danielle Voyles at different ages in her life.

Once able to comprehend what she was seeing, she could not resist walking toward the group. None of them paid attention to her. They were eating grilled spare ribs and potato salad, talking, and laughing. Two girls who looked only a few years apart were playing a spirited game of patty-cake together. One woman of about twenty-five
was scolding a very young Danielle whose face was smeared with chocolate. A girl in her late teens sat alone at the end of a bench reading a fat romance novel—Danielle still loved to read fat romance novels—while playing unconsciously with the ends of her long hair.

“Would you like some food? Are you hungry?”

Tearing her eyes away from the scene, Danielle turned and saw the girl in blue offering her a paper plate piled high with delectable-looking spare ribs and potato salad. In her other hand was a cup filled with a brown bubbly drink. Danielle guessed that it was Dr Pepper, her favorite.

Without speaking, she took both and followed the girl over to the tables. Again, no one there paid attention to her other than to slide over and make room. After the girl sat down next to her, she helped herself to a large rib off Danielle's plate and quickly began eating it. She got a smear of barbecue sauce on the left side of her mouth because she ate so fast and sloppily. Wiping it away with the back of her hand, she went back to gnawing the rib. It was clear the girl wanted to eat and not talk, so Danielle began eating too. It was better that way, because it enabled her to focus on the women around them.

Everyone's voice was different. One was high and irritating, while another's was slurred and mumbly. She tried to concentrate on specific women and see if she could match the voices to the faces. It was interesting how infrequently they fit together. One girl who could not have been more than ten had a startlingly low voice. Only after listening awhile did Danielle realize the kid had a bad cold. Of course! Since her childhood, whenever she fell sick, her voice dropped an octave into what she called her frog voice. Boyfriends had said it was sexy and they liked it, but she thought it sounded as if she were croaking. This girl who spoke now in that low frog voice sat two Danielles away.